Progressive Rock
The English Wikipedia entry defines Pattern-Seeking Animals as a “supergroup”. Well, we’ve been selling that term pretty cheap lately.
It’s true we get four excellent musicians: John Boegehold on keyboards and backing vocals, Jimmy Keegan on drums (ex-Spock’s Beard), Ted Leonard on vocals and guitars (Spock’s Beard), and Dave Meros on bass and backing vocals (Spock’s Beard). So, 75% of it is one band with one extra member added on. As a great German philosopher of our times once said: “Nossing more needs to be zaid.”
We dive into this album through “The Man Made of Stone”, where, after a lovely introduction, the track kicks off and we start to notice a richness in the instrumentation, but a very flat, shallow production. Despite these apparently deliberate limitations, we find exactly what we expected: a kind of hybrid between The Flower Kings and Spock’s Beard — you didn’t need to be a genius to guess that. If we overlook some keyboard tones of dubious taste, we get an entertaining, light track with really good vocal melodies and more than interesting arrangements featuring countless instruments: acoustic guitars, mandolins, virtual strings, two basses, and so on.
The second track is “Window to the World”, with well-executed interplays of speed that give it great dynamism. I’ll say again the strong point is the vocal melodies and the composition’s variety.
A lone bass introduces us to “What Awaits Me”, where the game here is the alternation between binary and ternary rhythms. The whole atmosphere is fairly nostalgic, and you can’t help noticing how the track is steered by the mandolin and lovely keyboard arrangements. It’s perhaps a bit soft, but hey, who wants metal all the time? That said, it runs about a minute and a half too long, since they spend that time repeating the same ideas after everything had already been said.
Intimately, with piano, flute and voice, we’re accompanied on “He Once Was”, where the track develops progressively (it’s what progressive rock does), without losing the intimacy offered at the start. Then we get a second part where full instrumental variety unfolds, with different instruments taking turns across various melodic lines and solos, giving us an attractive musical body. We then move to a third section where vocals return to the spotlight, with a strongly folk-inflected feel more typical of Anglo-Saxon bands. This gives way to a long, but not boring, passage combining guitar and saxophone solos, and it’s completely unavoidable to end up mentioning Pink Floyd’s “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” as an obvious influence. Finally, the track concludes with a vocal coda on the main motif.
Continuing with an introspective introduction, we get “Undermeath the Orphan Moon”. Right after, every cheesiness alarm goes off, since it’s a mawkish, fussy track that, in ballad form, gives us finicky choruses. In private I could give you a Spanish adjective that would fit it perfectly.
Listening to the keyboards on “Clouds That Never Rain”, you have to wonder where the boundaries of progressive rock actually lie, since you can hear the influence of Camela-style production on the keyboards, though I doubt these gentlemen have ever heard anything by that band. So we’ll chalk it up to an unfortunate production choice. Otherwise, it’s a light little song with repetitive melodies and some structural complications that make up for its overall triviality.
“Bulletproof” is an anodyne composition that once again wallows in cheesiness. A perfect track for a nineties album by one of the Gibb brothers. And on “Somewhere North at a Distance” we run into the problem plaguing so many bands with middle-aged keyboardists: reinvent yourself or die, since Korg M1 tones are well past their sell-by date. And it’s a shame, because the track itself is fairly good — entertaining, and full of dramatic moods and enticing musical complexity — but you can’t help thinking about how worn-out and dated the production is.
“Summoned from Afar” suffers from the same practices, made worse by melodies and saccharine backing vocals that are becoming far too recurring. And once again, the instrumental middle section is probably the most salvageable part of this track. Season all that with a runtime of seven and a half minutes, and you’re seriously tempted to hit the next button.
And the introduction to “Love Is Still the Light” couldn’t possibly be any cheesier. Well, actually, the title fits it perfectly. Your classic American lighters-in-the-air track — or a lighter looking to burn the sheet music instead. What a horror to end an album this way.
But it’s not over yet, because there’s a bonus track. Another suspicious way to end a record, since it’s usually just a leftover. And indeed, it is one. More sloppy, vulgar sugar in a soooooooo pretty little pop song.
Honestly, given what I was expecting after hearing some of the album’s previews, I ended up pleasantly surprised, since the first half wasn’t as syrupy as I’d thought. Lovely melodies, pleasant moods, interesting arrangements. But in the second half, alas, they left in a whole run of weak, unremarkable and, frankly, uninspiring tracks.
What happened to them? Their previous albums didn’t suffer from these flaws, even though they’d never been a particularly forceful band — but you always found intensity and something fresh within their take on progressive rock. It probably would have done them good to take some time to compose more maturely and, once again, not offer up such long runtimes, almost as a matter of statistics: the longer the record, the greater the risk of padding it with superfluous tracks.
So it would have worked out better to take the first four tracks and slot in one or two from later on, and a stronger record would have come out of it. There’s too much to discard here. Anyway, recommended for die-hard fundamentalists of Spock’s Beard, Neal Morse, The Flower Kings, and the like.
Pattern-Seeking Animals website
Pattern-Seeking Animals bandcamp
Writer: David Sàez